I’m a quantitative ecologist by day. Nearly all of my research has been on birds, but I’m currently working on a large collaboration to monitor monarch butterflies. Work has taken me to many far-flung places, which provided a variety of birding experiences.
I’ve been commuting exclusively by bike since 2007, and started riding longer distances for fun in 2012, so it was natural for me to transition to birding by bike. I started green birding in a serious way in 2014, when I moved to Kansas after a few years in New Zealand. The birding in New Zealand was shockingly poor – the birds there are special and amazing, but one must access remote areas that are free from introduced predators to find the birds – so I was feeling bird-deprived when I moved. In contrast, the birding (and biking) in Kansas was excellent. I made up for lost time, biking or carpooling for every birding trip, and haven’t stopped yet.
I moved to La Crosse, WI in Oct 2016 and did all of my birding by bike in 2017 for a total of 213 species.
In 2018, I put in some extra effort for a Green Big Year in Wisconsin and tallied 238 species, including some much farther afield than my home county!
In 2019, I'll continue birding by bike, and will also pay more attention to my patches, both 5MR and 7.5MR. (MR = mile radius, with my home as the center point.) The 5MR Challenge has taken off worldwide, and Wisconsin hosts a 7.5MR Challenge each year.
For 2019, I'm tracking my green year list in the sidebar (my 2018 list now has its own page). At the bottom of the list, I'll mention my current species total for each patch.
Stay tuned! You can enter your e-mail address at the top left of this page to receive updates, or follow my Green Big Year on Facebook to get notified of new posts and perhaps see a few extra photos between blog updates. I’ll talk about the birds I’ve found, of course, but also about the challenges and joys of birding by bike and what I’ve learned along the way. You can also check out my checklists in eBird and follow the current status of the participants in the Wisconsin Green Birding Challenge and the 5MR Challenge.
